The Quranic Concept of History - by Syed ALi Ashraf

fall of nations integrally related to faith and Man's behaviour,
his acceptance or denial of the Message that Allah
had sent through His prophets. Political authority is shown
to have been linked up with the moral and spiritual conduct
of Man. The life of the last Prophet, peace be upon him,
proves beyond all doubt that all authority ultimately belongs
to Allah. He chooses those who obey Him and fight
for His cause. When a nation disobeys Allah and upsets
the code of life granted by Him then Allah sends warnings
to that nation in the form of natural calamities. But if the
nation does not repent and becomes more hard-hearted then
He sends human beings to destroy those people. He also
sows the seeds of discord among those nations which give
up His code and proudly and arrogantly pose to be selfsufficient.
There is thus a Divine plan in history. Increase in
wealth or a higher standard of I iving does not mean real
happiness. Real happiness consists in pure living, in humi 1-
ity, in resignation to the Will of Allah, and in fighting
in His path in order to establish His kingdom on the earth.
Any nation that becomes morally degenerated is bound to
fall and lose its greatness.
The Modern Image
A modern historian would present the first human being
or the first group of human beings as having emerged through
a biological process, how we do not know. Instead of being
a Man endowed w; th knowledge and of his being a Prophet,
the first man, so the historian conjectures, must have been
'a primitive' creature, intellectually stunted, and culturally
blind. Psychologists and social anthropologists I ike Jung
and others have drawn inferences from their limited observations
and formulated this theory about the 'primitive Man'
and his consciousness. It has now become a fashionable
concept.
Once they accept the theory of 'primitive' consciousness,
it is logical and legitimate for these scholars to formulate
a theory about the growth of 'modern' consciousness. This
theory has been successfully propounded and used. It is
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